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Poet Quotes (page 8)

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic. Walker Percy
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. T. S. Eliot
Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb! Anais Nin
A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed. Stanley Kunitz
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one. Aldo Leopold
I'm really very sorry, but it is not my fault. People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists Oscar Wilde
If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light, Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content: --The stars pre-eminent in magnitude, And they that from the zenith dart their beams,(Visible though they be to half the earth, Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness)Are yet of no diviner origin, No purer essence, than the one that burns, Like an untended watch-fire on the ridge. Of some dark mountain; or than those which seem. Humbly to hang,... William Wordsworth
The poet wishes to strike beautiful notes, not new notes... To ask or expect a poet to strike a new note in poetry is exactly like asking or expecting the Nightengale to strike a new note in her perennial song. Alfred Douglas
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy. Martin Heidegger
TYRONE[Stares at him -- impressed.]Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right.[Then protesting uneasily]But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND[Sardonically]The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful... Eugene O'Neill
Jose Ortega y Gasset quote: "The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live..."
The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent. Jose Ortega y Gasset
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head. Gilbert K. Chesterton
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. Virginia Woolf
None but a poet can understand a poet; none but a romantic spirit transported with poetry and consecrated in the Holy of Holies an comprehend what the ordained utters out of his inspiration. E. T. A. Hoffmann
Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. Frank O'Hara

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